This is a Division of application Ser. No. 10/367,840 filed Feb. 19, 2003 now U.S. Pat. No. 6,863,370. The entire disclosure of the prior application is hereby incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
This invention relates to: a method of generating ejection pattern data for selectively ejecting a functional liquid droplet from a functional liquid ejection head to a work or workpiece, and a method of generating head motion pattern data; an apparatus for generating ejection pattern data, and an apparatus for ejecting functional liquid droplets; a drawing system; a method of manufacturing a liquid crystal display device, a method of manufacturing an organic electroluminescence (EL) device, a method of manufacturing an electron emitting device, a method of manufacturing a plasma display panel (PDP) device, a method of manufacturing an electrophoresis display device, a method of manufacturing a color filter, and a method of manufacturing an organic EL; a method of forming a spacer, a method of forming metal wiring, a method of forming a lens, a method of forming a resist, and a method of forming a light diffuser.
Conventionally, in a functional liquid droplet ejection device, such as an ink jet printer, which ejects ink (functional liquid droplets) from an array of nozzles arranged at the same pitch on an ink jet head (functional liquid droplet ejection head) for forming of dots, drawing is carried out by moving one ink jet head in a main scanning direction and a sub scanning direction relative to a workpiece. In this case, ejection pattern data (drawing or imaging pattern data) indicative of a pattern of ejections from the nozzles are generated for each of nozzle arrays (heads), and the generated data are sequentially supplied to a head driving device for ejection (drawing) of functional liquid droplets equivalent to one array.
However, in a large-sized printer or the like, in view of a yield of functional liquid droplet ejection heads, all (one-line) nozzles arranged in the sub scanning direction are formed not by a single functional liquid droplet ejection head but by a plurality of functional liquid droplet ejection heads. For this reason, assuming that one line is formed by arranging six functional liquid droplet ejection heads each having two arrays of nozzles, it is necessary to form ejection pattern data for a total of twelve arrays of nozzles. However, the amount of ejection pattern data for the twelve arrays of nozzles is enormous so that it is practically impossible to generate ejection pattern data by the conventional method of generating ejection pattern data for each of the nozzle arrays.